Spring Revolution
Persian Arts Festival : : 10th Anniversary Celebration
About the event
The Persian Arts Festival celebrates 10 years of showcasing the work of hundreds of Iranian American artists from around the world at National Sawdust. The 10th Annual Persian Arts Festival will feature multiple art forms including short films by Iranian Americans, performances by established poets, curated by Zohra Saed and Sara Goudarzi, the NYC premier of vocalist and daf player, Aida Shahghasemi, who fuses her exquisite Persian classical vocal training with indie-rock tendencies, and Mitra Sumara, a big-band of NYC-based musicians dedicated to Pop/funk music from Pre-Revolutionary Iran.
For more information, visit www.persianartsfestival.org.
Music and Film
Program
8:30pm – 9pm – DJ Mix
9pm – 9:45pm – Short Film
9:45 – 10pm – DJ Mix
10pm – 10:45 – Poetry Segment
10:45pm – 11pm – DJ Mix
11pm – 11:45pm – Aida Shahghasemi
11:45 – midnight – DJ Mix
12am – 12:30 – Mitra Sumara
Aida Shahghasemi
Mitra Sumara
Short Films
Short films will be presented that reflect the Iranian heritage, family history, and commemorate our widely celebrated holiday, Norouz.
“Imagine Native” | by Mina Bozorgmehr & Hadi Kamali Moghadam |
“Norouz (نوروز) – Songs of Pardis” | by Negar Behbahani & Saloomeh Sayah |
“Current” | by Nika Khanjani |
“Cycles of Lambent Frequencies” | by Negin Sharifzadeh |
“Even Gray Feels Blue” | by Negin Sharifzadeh |
Poetry
Curated by Zohra Saed and Sara Goudarzi, this segment of the program will bring poets, authors, scholars of both Iranian and non-Iranian descent together in celebration of Spring, renewal, and rebirth.
Fayre Makeig
Angelo Verga
Angelo Verga has been widely published, translated, and anthologized. A former owner of, also longtime literary curator at The Cornelia Street Cafe, Verga has helped to promote poetry as a popular and much-needed art form. His seventh book of poems is Long & Short, including The Street in Your Head (2016) and is available on Amazon.
Sahar Muradi
Sahar Muradi is a writer and performer born in Afghanistan and raised in the U.S. / is co-editor, with Zohra Saed, of One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature / is co-founder of the Afghan American Artists and Writers Association / has published in Drunken Boat, dOCUMENTA, phati’tude, Green Mountains Review, elsewhere literary magazine, Bone Bouquet, and The Poetry Project Newsletter / is a Kundiman Poetry Fellow, an AAWW Open City Fellow, and twice recipient of the Himan Brown Creative Writing Award in Poetry / has an MFA in poetry from Brooklyn College, an MPA in international development from NYU, and a BA in creative writing from Hampshire College / directs the poetry programs at City Lore / and believes in the bottom of the rice pot.
Ravi Shankar
Ravi Shankar is an award-winning poet, editor, translator and professor of writing who founded the international online journal of the arts Drunken Boat, and has published or edited 10 books and chapbooks of poetry. His most recent collection is “What Else Could it Be: Ekphrastics and Collaborations.”
Soraya Shalforoosh
Soraya Shalforoosh’s first collection of poetry, This Version of Earth was published by Barrow Street in November 2014. Soraya has been a featured poet in the Journal of the Academy of American Poets Emerging Poet Series, and has had poems and reviews in Tribes.org, Good Foot, Taos Journal, Barrow Street, Skanky Possum, Bomb Magazine, Marlboro Review, WSQ, Can We Have Our Ball Back.com, Shampoo Poetry, Brink: An Anthology of Post Modern American Poetry, Four Corners, Salonika, etc. Soraya has her MFA in Creative Writing from the New School and as an undergraduate at Clark University, won first place in the Prentiss Cheney Hoyt Poetry award. Ms Shalforoosh has been a Writer in Residence at William Paterson University in NJ, a guest poet at Berkeley College in New York, guest speaker at the American Embassy in Algeria. Soraya has performed her poetry with jazz, blues and world music bands in clubs, universities and Central Park.